Need something else to stare at instead of the never-ending slabs of sidewalk, or the luminescent lights on your late-night trip home from the library? If you are adventurous and willing to change the direction of your eyes to 90 degrees above their usual level, then you are in for a cosmic event — pun intended. Although you can think of plenty of reasons to continue your morose concrete-staring, music-blaring habits, your midterm-prone life is no reason to miss the Leonids, the only prolific meteor shower of November.
While the shower was expected to peak on November 17 at around 3 a.m., the regular atmospheric penetrations were visible throughout the nights of November 15 to 19.
Throughout the shower’s fourteen-day span, over 12 tons of particles cascaded across the entire planet. Though sceptics and cynics may sneer at the 20 meteors per hour as mere turtle haste compared to the speed of our information age, the Leonids are known for their bright “fireball” meteors which are capable of exerting the kinetic energy equivalent to the collision of a car travelling at 100 km per hour. And all this in a two-centimetre package.
Whereas the timing of this year’s shower overlapped with the peak of our moon’s crescendo, historically, the Leonids have been a splendid spectacle. The shower is associated with the Tempel-Tuttle comet, which has a diameter of approximately 3.6 kilometers, and was discovered in 1866 by the astronomers whose names the comet bears.
The shower’s current reputation is associated with its superlative stormy performance noted in 1833, when an observer could see over 100,000 meteors per hour. This magnificence returned, albeit on a smaller scale, in 1866 and 1867 when the shower reached rates of over 1,000 meteors per hour. While Tempel-Tuttle’s orbit closely intersects that of Earth, the cloud particles associated with the stormy scene of the late 1860s shifted positions, causing a great variation in atmospheric penetrations, and its mysteriously low occurrence in the late 1800s.
Naturally, the Leonids impact not only our beloved blue planet but all its satellites — natural and artificial alike. If the greyish-white moon were observed through a telescope throughout the Leonids’ occurrence, a faint tail-like optical sensation could be identified, stretching from our lunar comrade towards the sun. This characteristic is associated with the moon’s constant release of sodium gas, most easily observed when it is experiencing marvellous meteor bombardment. While no academic source has described how artificial satellites cope with this annual shower, it is assumed that they are no strangers to human and spatial debris.
In the past decade, there has been heightened alacrity surrounding the shower’s behaviour. Last year, a range of 100 to 500 meteors could be observed at peak time, which also occurred on November 17. Although there are no guarantees when observing meteors, the possibility of getting 20 wishes per hour would surely entice many to watch for these falling stars.
Having paraded under the waterfall of the Leonids meteor shower, next week we will look at the great life of a famous German-born British astronomer and composer, known for discovering the planetary neighbour of this author’s favourite planet. Until then, take a much-deserved break from your yellowed and dry textbook pages, and peer into the depths of the night sky experiencing the fantastical Leonids shower.
